Malaysia Airlines crash: terror fear over four mystery passengers on missing plane MH370Air
safety experts investigate whether terrorism was behind the
disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines flight which vanished over the
South China Sea

Air safety experts are investigating whether an
airliner that mysteriously vanished in the Far East could have been the
target of a terrorist attack.

More than twenty-four hours after
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared over the South China Sea, the
only clue to the fate of its 239 passengers and crew was the revelation
that the identities of four people on board, including two using stolen
passports, were being investigated.

The disclosure raised fears
that terrorists could have used false passports to board the craft,
which vanished with no prior signals of trouble to air traffic
controllers.

Those fears increased when Malaysian authorities
later confirmed that they were liaising with the FBI over the suspect
identities. The four under suspicion had all bought their flight tickets
through China Southern Airlines, said a security official.

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The plane
was heading from the Malaysia to China, where last week 33 people were
killed and 143 injured in a terrorist attack in the south-western city
of Kunming. The attack, in which a gang of men ran amok in a Chinese
railway station, was blamed on pro-separatist ethnic Uigurs, who come
from the mainly Muslim areas of the Xinjiang region that borders
Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some Chinese media have branded it the
country's own "9-11".

Officials stressed that it was too early to
say whether terrorism was a likely cause of the Malaysia airlines
crash. But US officials said the FBI was checking passenger manifests
and going back through intelligence.

"We are aware of the
reporting on the two stolen passports," one senior official told NBC
news. "We have not determined a nexus to terrorism yet, although it's
still very early, and that's by no means definitive."

A leading
aviation safety expert also said that it was "extraordinary" that the
pilots of the jetliner did not have time to make a distress call.

David
Learmount, of the specialist aviation magazine Flight Global, said that
as the plane was cruising at about 35,000 feet when it lost contact
over the South China sea, the pilots would normally have had "plenty of
time" to radio in any technical problems before the plane hit the water.

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Barack Obama's deputy national security
adviser, Tony Blinken, has told CNN that the US is looking into reports
that two passengers on flight MH370 were using stolen passports.

He said it was premature to speculate whether the passengers had a role in the Boeing 777's disappearance.

Blinken
also said investigators from the FBI, the National Transportation
Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration are heading to Asia
to assist in the investigation.